If SQL Server 2005 releases to manufacturing in the second half of 2005, this latest upgrade to Microsoft's flagship client/server database management system will have been more than five years in the making. According to Kimberly Tripp's DAT250 "SQL Server 2005: Bridging the Gap between Development and Administration" TechEd breakout session, the SQL Server team's headcount has grown from about 400 for 1998's SQL Server 7.0 release to almost 1,000 for SQL Server 2005 and its belated WinFS project.

This article describes what VS database developers can expect from Microsoft's investment of 4,000+ person-years in SQL Server 2005. (4,000+ person-years assumes that the SQL Server 2000 team numbered 700 at release and grew at a constant 60-person/year increment to 1,000 over the past five years.)

It's a good bet that every Windows database front-end developer is at least aware of SQL Server 2005's most important new features and most VS 2002/2003 users have at least some hands-on SQL Server Project coding experience with VS 2005 beta and Community Technical Preview (CTP) versions. Paul Flessner provided an early view of Yukon during his October 21, 2001 presentation at the Professional Developer's Conference (see Resources). Flessner described Yukon's native HTTP Web services, XML data type, and XQuery processor, and he demonstrated C# stored procedure code hosted by the database engine.

SQL Server 2005's SQL/CLR features have undergone only superficial changes in the intervening four years, but VS 2005's latest SQL Server Project template greatly simplifies writing and deploying .NET stored procedures, triggers and user-defined functions, data types and aggregates. Another important .NET Framework 2.0 change is unification of ADO.NET 2.0's System.Data.SqlServer and System.Data.SqlClient namespaces for CLR code that runs inside or outside the SQL Server process.

ADO.NET 2.0 also lets developers implement Multiple Active Result Sets (MARS) with SQL Server 2005 and asynchronous SqlCommands with SQL Server 2000 or 2005. (You must specify a TCP/IP or named pipes connection to SQL Server 2000; a shared memory connection won't work.) MARS lets you execute multiple SqlDataReader objects on a single SqlConnection. MARS substitutes session pooling for connection pooling but, according to Microsoft's Angel Saenz-Badillos, doesn't improve data access performance compared with opening two pooled connections. The primary incentive for using MARS is to execute multiple commands in the same transaction isolation scope. The VS 2005 team dropped asynchronous SqlConnections shortly after announcing them.

T-SQL gets a raft of new reserved words, including PIVOT, UNPIVOT, CROSS APPLY, OUTER APPLY, and TRY/CATCH blocks for error handling. The PIVOT operator lets you write crosstab queries that are similar to Jet crosstabs but require fixed (explicit)rather than expression-basedcolumn headers. UNPIVOT returns PIVOT result sets to their relational source structure. The APPLY operator lets you invoke a table-valued function for each row returned by a query. Parameterized TOP n [PERCENT] queries accept variables of the bigint (float for PERCENT) data type as well as explicit numeric values. ROW_NUMBER, RANK, DENSE_RANK, and NTILE ranking functions return a ranking value for each row in a partition. A WITH CommonTableExpression clause generates a temporary, in-memory table object that enables recursive queries and disappears when the query completes execution.

DDL triggers can prevent dropping or altering database object or audit execution of DDL operations. T-SQL support for many other new T-SQL keywords are associated with DDL for new database objects, such as HTTP endpoints of SQL Server native Web services, Service Broker messages, encryption keys, passwords, or certificates, query notifications, and schemas for typed columns of the new XML data type. Another example is enabling SQL Server 2005's new Snapshot transaction isolation feature.

SQL Server 7.0 added Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) services to version 6.5, and SQL Server 2000 provided data mining, notification and reporting, support for XML and many other important new features. According to Gartner's May 2005 "No Clear Winner in Overall RDBMS Market Share Race" research report (see Resources), SQL Server 2000 lead the RDBMS pack with an 18 percent overall growth rate from 2003 to 2004 and gained a 20 percent 2004 market share (compared to 34.1 percent for IBM and 33.7 percent for Oracle). 18 percent growth ranks as great performance in a market segment that Gartner found to have an overall growth rate of 10.3 percent.

Gartner attributes much of the 2004 database growth to vendors' business intelligence (BI) features, which are better classified in the database administration category. But new data encryption, XML data type, and Service Broker features are likely to generate a substantial part of SQL Server's market share growth from 2005 to 2006. In this case, market share, developer mind-share, and potential consulting revenue are likely to be tightly coupled.